Tag: Design-for-debate

For most Westerners it feels natural to shower once a day, to wash hands after a visit to the restroom and again before dinner, but in the long term these hygienic habits might do more harm than good to our health – researches say.

Three years ago Mark Kanters designed the Magic Meatballs for Next Nature’s Meat the Future Project. Seems like Space 10, Ikea’s research laboratory, was inspired by this concept and came up with a re-design of their famous meatballs. Creative Director Kaave Pour and copywriter Bas van de Poel explored the future and the possibilities of the undisputed protagonist product of Ikea restaurants.

In these modern times a traditional first aid kit won’t do anymore. As the world around us innovates, our needs in case of an emergency change as well. That’s the reason why a San Francisco-based design agency named Box Clever decided to redesign the classic emergency kit to suit the demands of life nowadays.

The Knotty Object summit promises to be a paradise of anti-disciplinary delight. The event held at the renowned MIT Media Lab gathers designers, scientists, engineers and writers around the discussion of four complex and omnipresent objects and the stories they tell.

The knotty objects–brick, bitcoin, steak, and phone–are employed as lenses through which we examine the current state of our society as well as the crossovers between design and technology. Speakers include Paola Antonelli, Tony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Kevin Slavin, Neri Oxman, Isha Dahar, Revital Cohen, Daisy Ginsberg and our own Koert van Mensvoort.

Wednesday and Thursday, July 15-16, at the Boston ICA and Media Lab. Video streamed all over the planet.

The tour of our lustrous NANO Supermarket is coming to Latvia! Tomorrow we will open a pop-up store in Riga. Come visit our glimmering new franchise from the 10th to the 12th of June at the EuroNanoForum 2015, Europe’s largest networking conference on nanotechnology.

We came to a point where it seems an innovative concept to design a mobile with identical functions to the phones we used two decades ago. This cell phone, called Light Phone, has been designed to be used as little as possible. Its selling point? It has just one purpose: making and receiving phone calls.

British artist Julie Chappell turns old circuit boards and hi-tech gadgets into a new species called Computer Component Bugs. Beetles, dragonflies, butterflies and bugs – made from recycled deconstructed computers, smartphones and consoles – bring back to life old electronic materials.

Does the illustration above pique your interest? Then, you should hear the story behind it. Kirsten Zirngibl‘s illustrations depict imaginary landscapes that are formed by microbots, which can be fed with new data to change the scenery entirely. Zirngibl explained that the piece above, called Microzoo, is made of microbots entirely.

Industrial designer and graduate student from Hadassah College in Jerusalem, Naomi Kizhner designed jewelry that could theoretically harvest energy from the body of the person wearing it. The jewelry is connected to the person’s veins and the blood is used to turn the wheels inside the jewelry, producing energy in return.

Kizhner’s aim in creating the speculative project is not to produce such a device, but to create a discussion on how far humans can go in providing solutions to our constant need for energy. The tool is called Energy Addicts and it consists of three pieces of jewelry: The Blinker, The E-Pulse Conductor and The Blood Bridge.

Our lustrous NANO Supermarket left the four wheels of the truck to open a 100 m2 pop-up store in Stavanger, Norway. If you are nearby, come visit our glimmering new franchise until the 1st of March at Article Biennial in the Stavanger Artmuseum.